OTTAWA — Conservative Blaine Calkins won the honours Monday as the MP to make the first government cheque presentation of 2014.

Calkins was providing some First Nations communities in his riding of Wetaskiwin, between Red Deer and Edmonton, with $2.9 million for various crime prevention projects.

If 2014 is like any other year, Calkin's announcement will be just the first of several hundred cheque presentations made by Conservative MP before we say hello to 2015.

In 2013, there were 1,770 cheque presentations, all of them by government MPs and none of them by MPs from other parties, and when you add up the value of all those cheques it totalled $8.9 billion.

Now that last figure, of course, is just a drop in the bucket of approximately $280 billion Ottawa will spend in the current fiscal year.

But that $8.9 billion represents spending that is politically valuable enough that a press release is drawn up for every little allotment, in both official languages, and sent out to the press by a local MP on behalf of a minister.

This is where the spending rubber hits the road, where a local MP can often earn a little kudos by getting his or her picture in the local paper distributing a bit of Ottawa's cash.

QMI Agency tracks each and every spending announcement as best we can. It's a tricky job because there is no one-stop shop or website where you can find all these spending announcements in one place.

The QMI "Ottawa Spends" database, updated daily from several sources, now has 4,200 separate spending announcements made by Conservative MPs since the last general election, totalling a whopping $29.5 billion.

In 2013, the smallest individual handout was made by Bryan Hayes, who represents the Ontario riding of Sault Ste. Marie. He gave the Township of Tarbutt $411 to help it fix up its public works garage. The single biggest announcement was a $531-million multi-year contract award to an Esquimalt, B.C., firm for refits of Canada's submarines. It was announced by B.C. MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay in July while she was associate minister of national defence.

In between, there was everything from money for light rail transit in Edmonton to cash to spruce up dozens of curling and yacht clubs around the country to grants to buy new snowplow trucks for dozens of Canada's smaller airports.

Denis Lebel, the minister in charge of Quebec's regional development agency as well as Infrastructure Canada, topped all politicians for getting political credit for spending. Lebel's name was on more than one in three spending announcements. Lebel's announcements along totalled more than $1 billion.

The QMI database also tries to pinpoint where the spending will take place in order to see if there's any evidence that the Conservatives are favouring their MPs when they hand out the cash.

The case for pork-barrelling though is ambiguous and depends heavily on what spending programs are measured. A funding program for hockey rinks and recreational infrastructure seemed to favour Conservative ridings, which tend to be in large rural ridings. But a funding program aimed at college and university infrastructure ended up being spent disproportionately in urban Liberal ridings where those institutions tend to be located.

Overall though, ridings held by Conservative MPs got $2.18 billion in 2013 or about 25% of all the spending tracked in the 2013 announcements. New Democrat ridings got $1.9 billion or 21%. In the House of Commons, Conservatives hold 53% of the seats while the Opposition New Democrats hold just 32% of seats.

So it would seem that those ridings that elected NDP MPs would seem not to be suffering.

But Liberal-held ridings saw spending of just $151.7 million allocated their way. That's just 2% of the $8.9 billion in spending announcements when Liberal MPs make up 12% of the House of Commons.

But then if we look at the number of announcements, we see press releases being issued for political credit far more often when the money is going to a Conservative riding. There were 895 such press releases compared to 395 when money was going to an NDP riding and 173 when money was going to a Liberal riding.

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